Imagine if I said “I’m a unicorn” to you and then started making unicorn noises and galloping around. You’d think I was pretty strange, wouldn’t you? (and that’s putting it mildly).
Yet, we say other equally untrue and bizarre things to ourselves every day. “I’m not good enough”, “I’m nothing special”, “I don’t deserve the best – I’ll put up with what I have”, “I can’t do this”, “This isn’t possible for me” and so on.
It is actually considered somewhat normal for people to have such internal dialogue, and we all have it to some degree. We don’t consider that it is actually very strange to make declarations to yourself about what you are not; that in saying such things and then acting like they are true, you are basically living inside a self-created delusion, hallucination or illusion.
This year I’ve undergone what I can only describe as a profound awakening.
A year ago, I took The Landmark Forum, a weekend course which transformed my life in ways that I never imagined. For me, it made me see that I’ve gone around my whole life adding meanings to life, and that those meanings – which become the totality of what I think I know about myself, others and the world – have shaped my view. Once I got that they were just my own meanings, and not the truth, I then was free to be present, live in the moment and see life as it is.
This has profoundly impacted how I view my body – I stopped living inside an opinion about my body and began to see it as it really was – my relationships with family and friends, my ability to communicate and listen to others (I listen to them, rather than to my opinion about what they are saying), to connect with people and many, many other exciting results.
Our experience of ourselves and the world is shaped by what we believe to be true about who are are as human beings. There are cultural and societal conversations about what a human being is capable of that we absorb, make our own and live inside of.
Before Roger Bannister ran the 4-minute mile, it was considered to be totally impossible for the human body to even do that. As soon as he broke through what was nothing more than some commonly held beliefs and a widely spoken societal conversation, 6 other people did the same thing that same year. Before him, nobody had been able to do it. This is the extent to which the widely held and popular notions about what it is to be human impact on performance.
We repeat already-existing beliefs about being alive without even stopping to question whether or not they are true. Often we don’t even realize that we subscribe to a paradigm about what it is to be a human nor that, ultimately, we are shaped and limited it.
Just as a fish in water doesn’t know it is in water, the average human does not stop to question what we really know about their own human-ness and whether or not it is accurate or adequate for the lives we currently live and the lives we wish to live.
5 Senses? I don’t believe you, Aristotle!
We are taught, for example, that humans have 5 senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste. This is something that Aristotle theorized, all the way back in 350 BCE. Life has come very far since then… what if Aristotle was wrong?
When the ashes clear from this economic Armageddon, the only organizations left standing will be the ones that actually stand for something. Without a purpose that improves people’s lives, and contributes to the greater good, organizations will struggle.
In October, the Aspen Institute will be holding a 1.5 day forum in which business leaders and thinkers will come together to look at vital question: “How do you measure success?”
They will explore some key questions including:
What constitutes a healthy society?
How do personal criteria for success influence the way we do our jobs, participate in our communities and view our legacy?
Although the seminar is mostly business focussed, this is a very important topic of discussion and exploration for us all as individuals and as a global community.
One of the most important pieces of self- and societal enquiry that our generation can do is to take a good, hard look at this and to unpack and re-create our notions of success.
We must question, challenge and unpick every idea about success that we have been taught, see whether or not they work for us today, and then create our own.
Without a true, created sense of success – without some kind of guiding principle – we are apt to get lost, caught up in whatever is around us at the time.
Another very important question is that if you don’t really know what constitutes success to you, how will you know when you are being successful?
I had a good chat today with Anil Dash, who is an awesome thinker, a pioneer in the tech world and someone who sees, lives and works on the connection between technology and culture. He is (among other things) Director at Expert Labs which is doing some great work interfacing policy makers with technology and people. At some point our conversation got to technological advancements.
We have super high speed internet connections, ipads, the ability to converse with people across continents via text, email, Skype, Twitter and so on. We have applications like Four Square, Google Maps and Google Latitude which give precise locations and enable you to track someone down from checking their location on a cell phone. The past 20 years have produced technological leaps and advancements that many of us could not have previously imagined.
Yet in many ways, all of that technology has not made our lives easier. There still seems to be something missing that computers and technology cannot fill.
I believe the next major advancement will not be a technological one. The next major advancement is – wait for it – YOU. Yes, it will be a radical shift in the world’s understanding of what it means to be a human being, to be alive.
I found the whole Shirley Sherrod case to be pretty disgraceful to be honest. I’ve written a number of pieces on it for different publications, as well as appearing on the BBC talking about the nature of the media today and how easy it is to score cheap political points by manipulating the media…
Here are some of the pieces I wrote on the case. In the very first piece, which was written before the full video was released, I questioned how we could possibly make a snap judgement based on a short video clip.
As I wrote: “I’m not saying that Sherrod was right. I don’t know. And neither does anyone else – because we haven’t seen the whole video. Until the entire video is seen, it is not possible to garner from that clip the exact context of what she was saying.”
It’s the same thing I said about Sonia Sotomayor and the ‘wise Latina’ comments. Without context there is no meaning. I didn’t need to see the entire video to know that firing someone (or forcing them to ‘resign’) over a short clip was utterly absurd.
“To be frightened of [the unknown] is what sends everybody scurrying around chasing dreams, illusions, wars, peace, love, hate, all that. It’s all illusion. Unknown is what it is. Accept that it’s unknown and it’s plain sailing. Everything is unknown…” – John Lennon
Children ask a lot of questions. They are always asking. They are unafraid to say that they don’t know something. It is partly this willingness to explore and ask that leads to the rapid development and growth that children undergo in such a short period of time.
Somewhere along the line – as a result of conditioning and having to pass school tests which punish us for what we don’t know – we come to believe that asking questions and admitting that we don’t know something is bad, wrong or a sign of weakness. We stop asking, stop admitting that we have no and instead begin to pretend that we know everything.
We begin to filter the world through what we think we already know. We filter the things we see and hear through what we think we already know, often dismissing or cancelling out those things that do not fit into our preconceived “knowledge”. We react to people and ourselves based on what we think we know about them. We become rigid in our notions about what we can and can’t do based on what we think we ‘know’ about our abilities.
I’m going to be 30 in a few months time. I’m big on birthdays. My new year begins every November on my birthday, rather than on January 1st so I am very reflective in the lead up to it.
This birthday feels big. It feels like the beginning of adulthood.
One thing I’ve realized growing up is that many of us – me included – are children in grown up bodies. We are more adult children, then adults.
There is nothing wrong with being child-like especially it comes to the innocence and wonder that children have for the world. But it is somewhat problematic to be a 28 year old who still responds to the world as if they are a 15 year old and the world is their parents or some authoritarian other that they have to rebel against or even conform to, as if they have no choice in the matter.
I was excited about turning 18. Then 21. Then 25. But even then I still wasn’t an ‘adult’. So what is an ‘adult’?
Imagine if I said “I’m a unicorn” to you and then started making unicorn noises and galloping around. You’d think I was pretty strange, wouldn’t you? (and that’s putting it mildly).
